The ground continues to shift beneath their feet, but scholarly publishers are showing signs that they have begun to learn to shift with it....
"We meet under some darkening clouds," Alex Holzman, the new president of the association and the director of Temple University Press, said in a lunchtime address to the group.
Mr. Holzman was not referring to the rain threatening outside but to forces that have rattled academic publishing: technology that changes in the blink of an eye, the open-access movement, a dismal economy, and overburdened state and library budgets. "The STM problem is crushingly real," Mr. Holzman said in a reference to the exploding costs of subscriptions to science, technical, and medical journals—costs that have eaten away librarians' budgets and cut into university-press sales....
In conversations and at panels, one had glimpses of a new ecosystem of scholarly communication in which an editor at Amazon.com may have better ideas about how to market a scholarly book than the book's own publisher does. (The Chronicle talked with one such editor, whose enthusiasm for scholarly books was formidable.) It's a world in which librarians are just as fed up with rapacious commercial publishers and sometimes stingy university administrations as university presses are....
Stevan Harnad —a champion of open access...— went out of his way to salute the quality-control system that publishers provide. Mr. Harnad is a cognitive scientist at the University of Quebec at Montreal. If the world wants high-quality scholarly literature, "which, as far as I'm concerned, we do forever," Mr. Harnad said, then it will have to find some way to pay for the kinds of peer review and copyediting that publishers have traditionally provided. Mr. Harnad, like others here, seemed to be suggesting a middle way, in which information could be free in some forms and still produce revenue for publishers....
University presses have..., for the most part, made their peace with Google —or at least Google Book Search. Since Microsoft has dropped its competing Live Search Books program, the Google option has become "the main game in town for discovering scholarly monograph content online," as the conference program put it.
All but a handful of university presses—that is, all except no more than six, according to Chris Palma, strategic partnership development manager for Google Book Search —have signed up....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/30/2008 02:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
